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Awesome Movie

Absolutely the worst movie.

The performances transcend the film's tropes, grounding it in characters that feel more complete than this subgenre often produces.

It's entirely possible that sending the audience out feeling lousy was intentional

I'm stunned, honestly. I am rarely thoroughly invested in movies because I can usually feel the clear divide between real life and the screen, but this one REALLY pulled me in. It was beautiful, for lack of a better word. Gorgeous. Some of the shots will stay with me for a very, very long time. Amy's pain...so real and heart- wrenching. And I love love love the posing in the very last scene. Visceral, cutting, vivid. I can see why people would be upset about this movie being labeled horror. Up until the very end, not much occurs that would be found in a typical horror movie. But at the same time, I can see why it IS horror. There are monsters everywhere in the movie: depression, trauma, a broken heart, desperation, Amy herself. And as she says in the movie, many other forms of violence exist besides the kind that involves a gun or a beating, and you see it so clearly everywhere in this movie. I can say, with all the genuineness I can muster, that I love this film. I'm usually very bad at handling the drama genre because I find that the emotions can be overwhelming. This one, though, is a perfect balance of quirky/funny/fascinating and utterly sad. It kept me engaged and hoping so hard for a happy ending without coming on too strong. So worth the watch.

This was not an easy film to watch. There is also no easy category to file it under so I am just going to call it a character study. Amy is an emotionally unstable young woman who works out her issues through visually stunning imagery sans audience. The imagery is neither pretentious or trite and the viewer gets the feeling that they are seeing work that the actress may have actually crafted herself. The pacing and tone of the film are unhurried and create an uneasy mood. The music is minimalistic, atmospheric and fitting. One of the things that I liked about this film, other than the aforementioned visual facets is that it isn't easy and is at times horribly uncomfortable(especially being a male viewer who has known women not wholly unlike Amy) and yet it is completely honest and original. I like the economy of means used in telling her story and would love to see more from this duo(Banker and Everson).

The summary does a good job of explaining the plot without giving too much away. So how is the experience of watching it? First the good - Atmosphere is cool, and the movie doesn't dwell too long on each scene so there's a nice forward momentum to the story. Characters are interesting, and even though the film focuses mainly on the lead the other characters can be pretty realistic and non-cliché. Finally, the movie is fresh in that you don't often see female leads who are getting into these kind of weird depressive aggressive states. Coming off of 7 Chinese Brothers you kind of get reminded about how many indie films have guys in the lead.Now the bad. As another review states the film does drag in the second half, and the start of the issues possibly begin in the bedroom scene (just after the halfway mark). In this scene the lead character (who might have been the victim of rape in the past) opens up to someone else. She goes onto say 'As a woman you're constantly objectified and discredited for anything you do because you're female', and 'just because you're a girl gives men the right to do whatever they want to you, because they (men) are selfish and exploitative'. Aside from being completely false, this kind of stereotyping of entire genders isn't recognized as a problem in the film, and if the film had explored the trauma that could lead a person to these kind of views it would have been balanced, but it never does. So what all this means is that the film doesn't go to places it should have (kind of like another recent film called 'Dirty Weekend' with an elderly Matthew Broderick questioning but never actually questioning his sexuality).There are probably other minor things I missed, but those should cover the main elements. Worth a watch - maybe.

Yep, the girl we see could be termed "self-loathing" or "mad". And yep she sometimes behaves in strange ways that irritate both her on-screen friends and us viewers.What we never see is what she was like _before_ "the trauma". What we see is that "the trauma" has permanently scarred her, so that all her attempts at rehabilitation are self-destructive, and her friends attempts at healing uniformly eventually fail.The skewed behavior we see is definitely _not_ what's recommended. If there's an (implied) "feminist message", it's something like "our sexist culture results in some individuals that are permanently so screwed up they not only can't help the culture, they can't even help themselves very much, like this one".What we see is the disaster resulting from "the trauma". Reading what we see as some sort of "recommendation" fundamentally misses the whole point.Watching a thoroughly screwed up person may be "educational", but it tends to not be all that much fun. So what else does this movie deliver? The first "what else" is that quite a few little bits are very funny, for example showing up to a porn shoot wearing a tongue-in-cheek skin-colored outfit (rather than a "birthday suit" as intended) and seducing the other model into playing along with the joke.And the second "what else" is quite a bit of truly interesting art. It's unconventional, and a lot of it is vaguely disturbing. Yet at the same time it's undeniably beautiful.This film is squarely in the "mumblecore" tradition: low production values, tiny crew, amateur actors, about the concerns of thirty-somethings, little or no music, and very naturalistic dialog. (I personally am not a big fan of "mumblecore" in general, and my rating reflects my generic dislike more than it does anything about this film specifically.)